Women in the Bike Industry With Giant's Elysa Walk

As Giant gives full independence to its women’s brand Liv, we spoke to general manager Elysa Walk about being female in a male-dominated industry and the company’s efforts to make cycling more accessible to everyone

leah flickingerJuly 30, 2014

Photo by Wendy Griffith Photography

An outspoken advocate for women’s cycling, Walk presented “The Joy of Two Wheels” at TEDxVailWomen last fall.

Bicycling: Tell me about your background and how you came to Giant.
Elysa Walk: I came to the industry pretty humbly. I don’t have a bunch of race medals sitting at home from all the stuff that I’ve won. I didn’t come up through retail, I didn’t come up through advocacy. I came from the software industry.

I went to undergrad at USC, graduate school at Pepperdine, both in business. I was running operations for a software company for ten years. Then the company got sold, and my kids were little, so I actually was a full-time mommy for a couple years, and I got to stay home with them.

How old were they at the time?
One and three. So about the time that they were starting to go into school, I found out about this opportunity at Giant. They needed a human resources manager. I used to manage HR, so I thought, “This will be fantastic.” I loved bikes. I had always ridden—different varieties of road or mountain, and at the time, I was doing triathlons. So I came in the door and I just fell in love with the company, fell in love with the industry. Within about six months, I took over finance. About a year after that, I took over most of our operations. When our president left, I had been there for four years, and in 2007 they gave me the reins.

You talk about falling in love with the industry. What surprised you most about it? What made you fall in love with it?
How passionate people were. I loved bikes, but I just couldn’t believe how much passion there is, and how much enthusiasm there is for the product. I also thought it was pretty amazing and unusual how your whole career could be centered around this sport. It makes employees very happy, very balanced. Everybody’s very healthy. They’re very energetic and enthusiastic about the product. You don’t get that from software.

As a woman in a high-level position in a male-dominated industry, what’s been your biggest challenge?
There are a lot of paradigms in our industry. It is a pretty traditional industry that’s based on races and performance. It is run by a lot of seasoned, mature men who grew up in the industry. I came in, and I wasn’t that. I was from out of the industry, it had nothing to do with my life, and I was a female. So there were a lot of people who didn’t have a lot of confidence in my capabilities, who didn’t think I could do it.

And as a new leader, I’m not going to know everything. What I really needed was people around me to support me and guide me through it, and I didn’t have that. I had people who didn’t have confidence in me, who thought, “She’s different. This isn’t gonna work.” We had people even leaving Giant, so it was hard. It took about three years, and we turned it around.

Now it’s almost the opposite, I think—that being a female in the industry is wonderful. I feel like the industry is right at the brink of embracing diversity where they haven’t in the past. I almost feel like people are celebrating me like, “Oh my gosh. You made it. We have a woman who made it in a senior rank in management.”

Going back to the first three years, when you didn’t feel like you had support, how did you handle that emotionally on the job? Was it hard to come to work every day?
It was really hard. My boss, Tony Lo, in Asia, had 100 percent confidence in me, and that never wavered. And he was in Asia, so it’s not like he’s in the corner office where I can go and ask this question and that question. There was a lot that I had to figure out, but he had confidence in me the whole way through. And I’m a fighter. I knew what I needed to do, so I just put my head down and did it. I didn’t worry too much about people who didn’t believe in me, because I believed in myself. If I sat and thought about it, yeah, it was upsetting, but I didn’t focus on it.

What’s been your greatest success?
Leading the charge to have women gain more momentum in the industry, both as riders and as employees, because the tide is changing, whether it’s women’s products, women’s events, women’s marketing, there is a lot of momentum happening right now, and I am deeply committed to it.

What do you think the industry needs to do to welcome women?
I think it’s just going to take a lot of work to get more women in the industry, but the more women that are employed, I think it’s just going to naturally happen. There’s the traditional channels, through retail, through advocacy. But I find, because women are such a small subset of the industry, they’re actually really supportive of each other. There’s not a lot of hating and competitiveness amongst the women. They sort of realize, “There’s not many of us. We better band together.” They’re pretty well networked.

What advice would you have for women who are interested in working in the bike industry?
Definitely come in. It’s a great place to come in now as a woman, because there is this movement toward diversity. A lot of companies are now looking for women, because they have so many men. They’re understanding the benefits of a diverse workforce. There are studies out now that diversity makes for more profitable companies. Companies make better decisions when there’s a diversified workforce.

It’s really cool time to be a female, because there aren’t too many of us. When we’re hiring for a position, we’ll get ten male resumes and one female, and I’m always like, “Oh, what does she have?” I’m very eager to see the one who might bring something unique compared to what we always see.

What do you think that the industry misses and forgets when it comes to marketing to women?
A lot. Most advertising and messaging is all about that male game face or coming across the finish line with his hands up or climbing some agonizing hill. Maybe there’s beautiful scenery, but it’s all about testosterone. Women don’t want that. Women aren’t going to be motivated by that. They like more aspirational imagery. They want to see their best self. They want to be inspired. Also, a lot of our advertising message is very technology-based. It’s not that women don’t care about technology. We want to do research before we buy a product, but we’re not going to swoon over the bike with the black background on a full spread in a magazine.

Has it been challenging at Giant to evolve the marketing message for women?
It’s been challenging because most of the outlets for marketing within our industry are all also male-dominated—not in terms of management, but just in leadership. You take VeloNews or something like that, and I think their readership is six percent women. They should just market to guys; that’s who’s reading it. Someone like Bicycling, your readership is starting to get toward that tipping point where our advertising that we’ve done is a lot more friendly.

Otherwise, we’re conscious of making sure we’re inviting all types of audiences. Our industry doesn’t do a very good job of pulling in new riders regardless of their gender. There’s all this photography of these guys coming off these gnarly descents, and I think that new riders say, “I’m not doing this sport. I can’t hurt myself. I’ve got a wife and kids and a job.”

What are the biggest barriers for women when it comes to riding bikes?
I don’t think there are any. I can’t come up with a barrier that’s unique to a female that a man wouldn’t have. The barriers are these paradigms that women see cycling as little tires and drop bars and an aggressive type of riding. The barrier is this paradigm that cycling isn’t friendly, when it actually can be.

What do you think are the best ways break down that barrier?
Coming from the brand side, it is really hard to advertise to women and speak to them the way that we want to because it’s extremely expensive. An ad page in Women’s Health is beyond our means. So we have to do other channels. We try to be very committed to our demo trucks and doing events at our retailers, doing clinics and ladies’ nights at a local level to get people on board. We have ambassadors out around the country trying to bring women into the sport in different ways. They’re kind of like our army.

We can’t so much take the message from the top down and push it onto people, so we have to go out and physically invite them in. Social media is a really great way to get the message out, but first you have to get them to follow you. Once you get them, you can tell them everything.

What is Giant doing to encourage more women to ride?
We do a ton to encourage women to ride, but our big story right now is that we’re really taking our brand to the next level with the model year ‘15 launch. We used to have Giant for women products, and we converted them over to Liv/giant, so we’re in our last and final step of that, which is converting to the whole Liv brand, so no more “/giant.” It’s 100 percent Liv. It’s kind of our final step to show women that we’re committed through and through. Even as Liv/giant, our bikes were 100 percent unique, but as just Liv, we’re really trying to make that greater step toward making cycling appealing to women.

I hate to compare us to another brand, but the best analogy that I have is Roxy. Women’s surfing was nothing before Roxy. There was no core, much like women in our industry today—it’s not like every mom around the corner is riding a bike. But Roxy came out, and they made a product just for women. Nobody believes that their surfboards are actually men’s and that they shrunk them down and put some flowers on them. Roxy infused this spirit about surfing that made it approachable and fun and stylish, and it made more women realize, “I can go surfing.” And there are camps and education surrounding it.

That’s largely our vision for Liv. For us, it’s a wider demographic, but it is a lot of that spirit. We want cycling to be fun, stylish, and accessible.